


Parliament

by RedRoseWhite



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fix-It, Gen, World Between Worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26354623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedRoseWhite/pseuds/RedRoseWhite
Summary: Installment two of the Fanart challenge: a fic based on a piece of fanart I was given as a prompt by nixcomix.Two convorees have a job to do in Mortis and beyond.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 20
Kudos: 21





	Parliament

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nixcomix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nixcomix/gifts).



Helia looks like she is sleeping when Jad alights on their perch, but he’s known her a millennium or two enough to know better. She hasn’t truly slept in almost two decades, and she might not again for a while more yet. 

“It happened today,” Jad says, even though he knows that she knows already. He bobs his wings, pretending to reposition them, when it’s really just because the dull light of morning on his black feathers makes rainbows, which he knows she appreciates. They begin in pink and end in green. 

“I knew that hours ago,” Helia says in that haughty voice he loves. She only deigns to open one onyx eye. Certainly wouldn’t turn her head. Even if his plumage _does_ look lustrous today. "The string grows taut as they draw together.”

Jad heaves a sigh, which makes the light on his breast refract into the blues of the waterfalls below, which he definitely didn’t expect to happen.

“What do you think our assignments will be when what has begun is finished?” 

“Oh, who knows what ridiculous task the Priestesses will cook up next,” Helia says, stroking her beak through her nape in a compulsive gesture, then settling again, adjusting the grip of her talons. “It can’t be worse than observing and intervening for these tiresome children.”

“You love yours and mine, as I do mine and yours,” Jad nudges Helia. She huffs. Helia hasn’t used a word like “love” in a very long time, and she isn’t about to start now. Leaving it all to Jad suits her very well.

“Well, she’s cleverer than that twisted up walking fiasco of yours. Kidnapping her and all! Couldn’t you have at least spent your dream-time with him more usefully, prepared him better for this day?”

“Oh,” Jad says ruefully. “I don’t have advice to give in that regard, I’m afraid. I’m not very good with females, either.”

“Well,” Says Helia, finally face-to-face with him as she hovers from the branch and prepares to escape this tedious conversation. “You certainly have that right.” But even as she flies away, she looks backwards, to catch a flash of the pink and green iridescence of his wings.

~~*~~

It’s evening-time and Jad is standing in the mossy pool at the bottom of the smallest waterfall. He dips and shakes; droplets wheel around and down his body, cooling him at last. His heart rate finally slows a little, then raises again as Helia’s splashing touchdown sends a small wave that forces him to skip a few steps or fall over from its momentum. 

“Did you see _that_!” her excitement is palpable. She can barely fold her wings and settle; she keeps bringing them to half-mast then unfurling them again. He doesn’t mind; he likes to count the brown speckles on the white undersides. She pretends she doesn’t like it, or even notice.

“I saw the same thing you did, just from the opposite end,” Jad murmurs. “Did… did we teach them that?”

“Which part, the bending to touch across distance and space, or the heartfelt conversation?” Helia says acerbically as she sinks back into her usual self again. This water truly does have a cooling effect, Jad thinks to himself. "Neither, methinks.”

“Of course, of course,” Jad says, looking up. His eyes trace the scallop of a violet cloud against the stars. “I wonder….. I wonder what they need us for."

“Humph,” Helia’s voice cuts through the curtain of water streaming from her mantle while she bathes her own back. “I would have thought that was obvious. Brains.”

~~*~~

“Brains!” Helia is coming in hot to the top of the monastery. Her talons skim so closely to the back of Jad’s skull that he feels a brief pluck there. “I can’t believe I thought you, of all convorees, might at some point impart the sense Force gave a Lava flea to that nerf-herding idiot.”

He turns his head slowly from one side to the other to calm down. 

“It - it wasn’t that bad as proposals go, was it?” When his head returns to its original position, he’s looking right at Helia and her beady eyes convey a mixture of pity and mirth that he would never have thought possible yesterday. Today has brought more than one or two impossible things.

“It was so bad, we’re both going to the Kusk Vaisius tree to eat the fermented fruit and get drunk,” she tells him. 

Helia can and does say a lot of things to Jad across the millennia, but not one of them has ever been a lie. He knows this is its own sort of kindness and even though there are things he is desperate to change in this world and the next and the one that runs parallel, not one of them is her. Or, if he’s honest about it, them.

~~*~~

For once, Helia’s feathers are as colourful as Jad’s, reflecting the blue-white light of this portal. They flutter and loop around one another in figure eights, settling just outside the hoop, then excitedly flying again. Jad sees the black-robed priestess emerge from the surrounding darkness first, and he settles on one of Serenity’s shoulders. She stretches up her left hand, and Helia rests on her finger in a moment. She leans in to Serenity’s caress up and down her breast.

Four figures arrange themselves in a semicircle on one side of the portal. They are all whispering questions and incantations and answers in a cacophony of voices that swell with emotion, but Serenity speaks to them clearly and rises easily above the din. 

“The journey is complicated and long, but you are well-prepared for this task,” She tells the convor pair. “Follow the string; you know what to look for.” This was all they needed to hear; a confirmation that between all worlds and dimensions, the red string would endure. Helia’s sharp eyes and Jad’s unfailing intuition would seek, and would find. “Bring them back together, and pull it taut once more. This is where your true purpose begins.”

At the moment of a graceful toss of Serenity’s arms, Jad and Helia lift away and fly around the portal, with rushing air and purposeful strokes of their wings.

“This was why all along, Helia,” Jad says, wonderment and joy propelling his barrel roll beside her. “This is why they needed interdimensional beings.”

“A lot of fuss and bother, “ She sniffs. “Maybe if you were better at giving sweet-talk lessons, this laughably grandiose gesture of _dying_ would not have been required.”

“I’m glad it’s you, Helia,” he tells her, in spite of everything. She pulls a bit closer and turns her head and this time, her eyes don’t have any pity in them. 

“Of course you are,” She twinkles. “Who else would enjoy your nonsense enough to tolerate it across the worlds? That lightweight Morai? I think not.”


End file.
